If you’re experiencing pain and it goes away, it’s easy to dismiss it as just one of those random body things. But Dancing with the Stars pro Alan Bersten was urged by his mom to follow up on stomach pains he was experiencing even after he felt better—and his pain turned out to be due to a tumor.

Bersten was on tour with Dancing with the Stars: Live! three weeks ago when he started to have sharp stomach pains that would last for about a minute and then go away.

He visited an urgent care center, where he was told that his blood had a high level of calcium. “At first [the doctors] were like, ‘Oh, it’s probably not a big deal. You’re probably just taking some supplements,'” he told People. “I went back on the road the next day, and my stomach stopped hurting.”

Bersten said he felt fine after that, but his mom pushed for him to go back to the doctor for another blood test. A week later, he got the results and discovered that his symptoms were related to a tumor on one of his parathyroid glands (which are in your neck and regulate your body’s calcium levels) and that he had a condition called hyperparathyroidism.

The benign tumor caused his parathyroid to release too much parathyroid hormone (which helps control calcium in your blood), so he needed to have it removed. Doctors were able to schedule Bersten for a two-hour surgery to remove his left parathyroid gland the next day. After a week of resting, he was back at work.

Bersten, who now has a one-inch scar in the middle of his neck, says he hopes his story will encourage other people to see their doctor regularly. “I’m getting my yearly checkups—I hadn’t been for four or five years, and I definitely learned a lesson from that,” he said. “It didn’t even seem like I was careless, I just never thought about going to the doctor because I was always so young and so active. It’s so important to monitor your body because the slightest thing can change your life forever.”

The parathyroid glands sit near the thyroid but have a totally different function.

Your thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland located at the base of your neck. It produces hormones that regulate your heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, and weight, according to the Mayo Clinic. Your parathyroid glands are four tiny glands about the size of a grain of rice that lie behind your thyroid, and they release a hormone that helps regulate your body’s levels of calcium as well as phosphorus.

“The words are often confused, but [they have] different functions—just an adjacent location,” Allan Siperstein, M.D., chair of endocrine surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, tells SELF.

There are two types of hyperparathyroidism, per the Mayo Clinic: Primary hyperparathyroidism is when one of the parathyroid glands becomes enlarged or has a cancerous or benign growth on it, which causes the gland to produce too much hormone, leading to high levels of calcium in your blood. Secondary hyperparathyroidism, on the other hand, is when another underlying health condition causes low levels of calcium in your body, so your parathyroid hormone levels increase to compensate over time.

The symptoms of hyperparathyroidism happen as a result of having too much calcium in the blood or too little calcium in the bones.

The condition causes calcium to leech out of your bones and intestines into the blood, Melanie Goldfarb, M.D., endocrine surgeon and director of the Endocrine Tumor Program at John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., tells SELF.

Symptoms can range in severity and include osteoporosis, kidney stones, excessive peeing, stomach pain, fatigue, depression or forgetfulness, bone and joint pain, feeling sick a lot with no obvious reason, and nausea, vomiting, or loss of appetite.

Given that some of these symptoms are somewhat vague (fatigue, stomach pain, forgetfulness, and nausea, for example), “a lot of cases of hyperparathyroidism are picked up through routine blood testing,” Saleh Aldasouqi, M.D., chief of the Division of Endocrinology at Michigan State University, tells SELF. However, if you have kidney stones or osteoporosis, your doctor will test you for hyperparathyroidism because of the link, Dr. Siperstein says.

While hyperparathyroidism is usually detected by a blood test, your doctor will likely order other tests to figure out how severe it is. Tests may include a bone mineral density test (which uses X-rays to measure how many grams of calcium are in a segment of bone), a urine test to see how well your kidneys are functioning, and an X-ray of your kidneys to see if you have kidney stones or other kidney issues, the Mayo Clinic explains.

Your doctor will also want to pinpoint the cause of your hyperparathyroidism (and determine whether a tumor is present), Joy Tsai, M.D., an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells SELF. In some cases, there is a reason the body is making more parathyroid hormone than usual, like if you have a vitamin D deficiency or low calcium intake.

Hyperparathyroidism can be serious if it goes undetected; people can develop kidney damage, dehydration, and lose consciousness, Dr. Aldasouqi says, pointing out that he’s even seen a severe case where someone with the condition ended up in a coma.

The only long-term treatment for hyperparathyroidism is surgery, but it isn't necessary in every case.

If your symptoms are relatively mild and your calcium levels aren't too alarming, you doctor may suggest monitoring your condition without treatment. In some cases, your doctor may give you medication that mimics the effects of calcium in the blood in an attempt to trick the parathyroid into scaling back its hormone production.

But surgery is the most common and effective method of treating the condition. Going through surgery and anesthesia always comes with some risks, but Dr. Siperstein says the procedure is “very minimally invasive.” In most cases of hyperparathyroidism, just one gland will be affected, although it's possible for more than one gland to be overactive. The good news is that your body can work just fine without one (or a few) parathyroid glands; your other parathryoid glands will kick in to pick up the slack, Dr. Siperstein says.

After a parathyroid tumor is removed, it’s highly unlikely that someone will have issues with the condition again. "Part of why I love what I do is that I fix patients and then they do awesome," Dr. Goldfarb says. "They forget that they ever had a problem."